Cate Crafter

As a big fan of both Park Chan-wook and Lee Byung-hun, it should come as no surprise that No Other Choice is my most anticipated film of 2025 (or 2026 if it doesn’t get released in the UK this year).

The Story

Park’s new movie is based on the book "The Axe" by Donald Westlake, in which a man desperate to gain employment goes around slaughtering his competitors. The book was released in the 1990s, and Park actually announced that he was going to adapt it at the Busan International Film Festival in 2009. Many projects have come in between, but it is clear that Park wanted to get his adaptation just right, claiming that he wanted "to make this film as my masterpiece.", and I believe (judging by this trailer) that the many years it has taken to complete the film have worked in the director’s favour.

Also, it must be said that the thematic nature of No Other Choice feels very eerie given the current job market. We’re in what is dubbed “Late Stage Capitalism”, and if you couple that instability-ridden system with the interference of AI, jobs are getting much harder to secure. Are we gonna start seeing unhinged nutters scouring LinkedIn profiles and using them as assassination checklists? Probably not, but that’s what will make this film so compelling because it will more than likely tell the story of an everyman pushed to the very brink to provide for his family. And that, my friends, is a subject matter so rich in terms of character development and psychological analysis. I truly believe Park will have the skills as the master storyteller he is to navigate a fascinating and heartbreaking story like this.

The Cast

Obviously, I am a massive Lee Byung-hun fan - according to Letterboxd, I’ve seen 16 of his movies, which doesn’t seem like much, but in reality, it’s still quite tricky to watch Korean movies in the UK.

But enough about Lee, what about the rest of the cast?

Son Ye-jin, I loved her in Something in the Rain, which is one of my all-time favourite Korean dramas. Park Hee-soon was an absolute scene stealer in My Name. Yoo Yeon-seok had a brief appearance in Oldboy and shared the screen with Lee Byung-hun in the brilliant historical melodrama Mr Sunshine, so I’m very much looking forward to his performance in this, too.

Cinematography and other choices

Stylistically No Other Choice feels very much like an amalgamation of every Park directed film and TV show out there. It’s the work of a master who has refined his style over the years. From the trailer you can grasp hints of Stoker in the sound design, the vengence trilogy in the stylish violence, the rich colour paletted interior designs of Decision to Leave and The Handmaiden, the oddball quirkiness of I’m a Cyborg, But that’s ok (like why is Lee shimmying through a dancefloor of people dressed as napoleon or conceling a gun under several oven gloves?!)